D&D 5E Player Races in Upcoming Volo's Guide to Monsters

[Parmandur]

I saw that as well, and it seems odd. But we know from the product blurb on the WotC page itself that goblins as a player race will be detailed in Chapter 2, so that seems to indicate a full write-up and not just a place in a chart. Perhaps the more "out-there" races like the goliath and firbolg are separated out in their own section? Given the page numbering, and how close they are to the beholder pages in Chapter 3, I'm thinking this might be the case...

Yeah, possible; the Orc god details are on page 83, they could be done with Orcs and Yuan-Ti by page 100, and who knows how chapter two is organized?

 

[Parmandur]

I'm not too thrilled by the inclusion of the Goliath. I know some people wanted the EEPC races in a physical supplement, but that was already fulfilled for the most part by the print on demand feature of DTRPG (Though it could've been better advertised.)

Especially because the current preview doesn't give much in the way of new lore. What it gives us that's new is a quote about how you shouldn't turn to them when you have no other options, as they will just turn their backs on you (though admittedly that one quote feels like it gives me a better perspective on how to play one than the EEPC did).

Noticed that quote is from Tordek, which is interesting on a couple fronts; is it maybe cribbed from a 3E product...?

 

[Demetrios1453]

Yeah, possible; the Orc god details are on page 83, they could be done with Orcs and Yuan-Ti by page 100, and who knows how chapter two is organized?

Maybe it will be like the Player's Handbook, with four "core" races (in this case goblins, hobgoblins, kobolds, and orcs), with miscellaneous races afterwards?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

That makes perfect sense; the Firbolg are chill, so berserker rage will be rare, and they are too laid back to hand their own native monastic tradition, too chaotic. You can do it, they are just setting general expectations for fluff purposes.

Can be justified =\= makes sense.

A generally chaotic race can easily be monks. A chaotic character can be a monk. An order of monks can be chaotic. Monks don't have to have a physical monastery to be monks. Being "laid back" as a race doesn't conflict in the least with having monks.

"Chill" has no impact on ability to commune with animal/land spirits and engage in totemic shamanism. "Most firbolgs barbarians are totem warriors. Berserkers, on the other hand, are almost unheard of."
Simple.

What they set up here, is defaults you have to argue against in order to play a perfectly reasonable bear warrior or chilled out, zen monk Firbolg.

 

[gyor]

Okay I think I've figured out roughly how many races there are in VGTM thanks to the fact that Roll20 will have over 130 tokens for it upon release.

If there are nearly hundred monsters, then over 30 tokens are likely player races, so my guess is likely being between 30 to 40 as the likely max, with at most 50.

I'd estimate 60 to 80 pages for the races chapter.

Of all of this is guess work and speculation of course. We do know that the PC races are 1 of three chapter, but its unlikely that all 3 chapters are equally large, with the PC races section most likely the smallest and the Beastiary the largest (to fit nearly a 100 monsters in its pages).

That's still a ton of new races. We know about Goliaths, Aasimar, Tabaxi, Goblins, Orcs, Kenku, Tritons, Firbolg (sort of they're really another giant kin race in practice) for certain.

 

[Parmandur]

Okay I think I've figured out roughly how many races there are in VGTM thanks to the fact that Roll20 will have over 130 tokens for it upon release.

If there are nearly hundred monsters, then over 30 tokens are likely player races, so my guess is likely being between 30 to 40 as the likely max, with at most 50.

I'd estimate 60 to 80 pages for the races chapter.

Of all of this is guess work and speculation of course. We do know that the PC races are 1 of three chapter, but its unlikely that all 3 chapters are equally large, with the PC races section most likely the smallest and the Beastiary the largest (to fit nearly a 100 monsters in its pages).

That's still a ton of new races. We know about Goliaths, Aasimar, Tabaxi, Goblins, Orcs, Kenku, Tritons, Firbolg (sort of they're really another giant kin race in practice) for certain.

Not possible; we know that Chapter one is still on Orcs on page 83, and Chapter 3 is describing Beholder stat blocks by page 123. 30 pages, maybe. Do recall that there is an appendix with NPC stat blocks, in addition to the monster stats in Chapter three; we don't even know what we don't know, yet.

Fantasy Grounds has a photo that shows a Kobold Dragonshield, and seems to imply the boom will have Chromotic Kobolds (Red, Black, White, Blue, Green).

 

[Parmandur]

Also, based on the DMG NPC table, I would say about thirty options may be covered in the tabular format...

 

[GreenTengu]

Okay I think I've figured out roughly how many races there are in VGTM thanks to the fact that Roll20 will have over 130 tokens for it upon release.

If there are nearly hundred monsters, then over 30 tokens are likely player races, so my guess is likely being between 30 to 40 as the likely max, with at most 50.

That would be quite a lot of PC races and I would have to imagine that a lot of them would be done with very little thought and consideration and come out quite badly. I don't want to see a bunch of them coming out anything like those found in the DMG where simply because they thought of a universal class ability to give the race to encourage the DM to use them in fights how they imagine the monsters would fight... they decided to give a bunch of them noting but negative attribute adjustments to shoe in the very powerful class ability. No skills, no situational bonuses, no primarily fluff abilities to encourage players to get more into the role.... Yes, they were more or less all done fairly well in 4E compared to the crap in 3.5e, but 4e had a very precise formula it used for all races so they all gave you the same amount of "stuff", just the precise attributes, skills and encounter power were different, but it was the same overall package. 5e doesn't have such a nice package. Attribute bonuses have been semi-consistent, though not entirely so and this may be the point at which they throw that all out the window.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Okay I think I've figured out roughly how many races there are in VGTM thanks to the fact that Roll20 will have over 130 tokens for it upon release.

If there are nearly hundred monsters, then over 30 tokens are likely player races, so my guess is likely being between 30 to 40 as the likely max, with at most 50.

I'd estimate 60 to 80 pages for the races chapter.

Of all of this is guess work and speculation of course. We do know that the PC races are 1 of three chapter, but its unlikely that all 3 chapters are equally large, with the PC races section most likely the smallest and the Beastiary the largest (to fit nearly a 100 monsters in its pages).

That's still a ton of new races. We know about Goliaths, Aasimar, Tabaxi, Goblins, Orcs, Kenku, Tritons, Firbolg (sort of they're really another giant kin race in practice) for certain.

As already pointed out, the page numbers we've already seen rule thus out (and don't forget there will be a whole yuan-ti section after the orc section, so even more of the available pages will be used up with that). I imagine that we'll have 130 stat blocks for 96 monster entries, with several entries getting several variants.

 

[Chaosmancer]

If thirty tokens would be for PC options, wouldn't we be looking at closer to 15 player options.

After all, most races have 2 genders so Roll20 would like to count them